Broken links are not only is bad for users, but they can also harm the SEO rankings of your site. Avoid adding broken pages to your WordPress or any website along with damaging information.
When users follow links on your site, they expect to find specific content once they reach that page. Trust is the biggest factor nowadays.
What are Broken Links?
Broken links and dead links are pages that do not contain any content that is unusable to both search engines and searchers.
Types of Broken Links:
Inbound (Internal) and outbound (External) are two types of broken links:
- Inbound links are those that are on your website.
- Outbound links are those that are targeting your website.
How Broken Links Affect Google Search Rankings
As you all know Google uses links to rank web pages.
Links pass the link signal. Google uses links for things like Googlebot and anchors text. So when they get the link, they can give you a ranking boost. When a page gets a 404, which means those links are broken.
when they visit a page that doesn’t work, those link prompts don’t have a chance to pass, and that’s your search ranking. damages. could. Usually, these are due to one of two reasons.
One, the dead link itself is bad. It points to a page that doesn’t exist on your website or something similar.
How to find or check dead links?
There are many tools out there to check or find broken links but we divide these tools into two categories: free tools and paid tools.
Free Tools
- Google Search Console
- Dead Link Checker
- Check My Links (Chrome Extension)
Paid Tools
- Ahrefs
- Ubersugest
- Semrush
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool by Google for the web performance of a website. It also helps you find dead links on the website.
Guide: How to use Google Webmaster Tool to find broken links:
- Go to the Google Search Console Website
- Verify your site
- Navigate to the “coverage section”
- Click on Excluded Pages
Dead Link Checker
Dead Link Checker is another great tool to find broken links, the feature of this tool is that you just enter your web address and the tool gives you a full sheet of 404 pages with anchor text.
Check My Links (Chrome Extension)
If you have a small site, you can use the “Check my links” Chrome extension by manually evaluating each page of your site and checking for broken links one at a time. Might be able to run this check manually.
Ahrefs Broken Link Checker
Ahrefs is the best tool for technical SEO, is paid but it’s worth it. you simply put your web URL in Ahrefs broken link checker and these tools give you full information about dead pages on your site. the positive side of this tool is it gives you information on both inbound and outbound broken links.
Ubersuggest
If your site is huge, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to manually check each page for broken links. In this instance, investing in a paid backlink checker like Ubersuggest, which can help you detect broken links in bulk on your site, is a good idea.
Checking outbound links is relatively simple with Ubersuggest: they have an “Outgoing Broken Links” report that finds and exports all broken links on your site in minutes.
How to remove or fix broken links?
Finding broken external links is only half the battle; Now it’s time to fix them! This is the phase that takes the most time. Start by exporting your list from Google Search Console and working on it.
If you haven’t inspected your outbound links in a while, or if you haven’t checked them at all, you’ll probably find plenty to fix.
3 ways to remove outbound broken links
- Contact the owner of the website that links to your website page or blog post and ask them to remove or change that URL.
- Build content to that specific link that appears as a 404 error.
- Setup server-side redirects – that means redirecting the broken link to 301 (Page permanently removed)
header('HTTP/1.1 302 Found');
header('Location: http://www.example.com/newurl');
exit();For Inbound dead links, you can remove them manually because it’s on your site
Thanks!
